Acknowledgments

This book is the result of a few years of research, during which I benefited greatly from the advice, support and encouragement of many individuals whom I would like to thank. First and foremost, I would like to express my gratitude to Professor Jacek Fisiak, who sparked my interest in English historical linguistics many years ago, and on whose guidance and unfailing support I could always count. I wish to thank Professor Katarzyna Dziubalska-Kołaczyk, the Dean of the Faculty of English at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań and Piotr Gąsiorowski, the Head of the Department of Older Germanic Languages, who in various ways enabled and facilitated the realisation of this project. I am particularly indebted to Piotr for encouraging and motivating me throughout the years to pursue and complete this project as well as for his trust in me. I am also very grateful to my new colleagues from the Linguistics section of the English and American Studies at the University of Wuppertal for their encouragement and enthusiastic support in the final stage of completing the book.

This project was greatly facilitated by the grant from the Polish National Science Centre (NN104378940) and at an early stage by the Hertie Foundation (Gemeinnützige Hertie-Stiftung). I am very grateful to both institutions for their generous financial support.

The work has substantially benefited from advice and valuable and constructive feedback from several colleagues and experts in the field of Old Germanic linguistics. In particular, I wish to thank Professor Ann Marynissen for her feedback on the Old Low Franconian chapter, Professor Arend Quak for his comments on the Old Saxon and Old Low Franconian chapters, Piotr Gąsiorowski and Ron Kim for commenting on the Proto-Germanic part of the study. I gratefully thank Marcin Krygier for his advice and comments on some aspects of the Old English content, but also for inspiring my interest in nominal morphology. I owe a special debt to Arjen Versloot not only for his detailed, critical and insightful comments on the entire manuscript, but also for his assistance with the analysis of the Old Frisian material as well as for many inspiring discussions of various aspects of the book. Furthermore, I wish to thank Professors Jerzy Wełna, Theo Vennemann and Elżbieta Wąsik for their advice, inspiration and encouragement over the years. I would also like to thank Joanna Śmiecińska for commenting on fragments of the manuscript as well as for her continuing support and encouragement. I am indebted to Derk Drukker from the Fryske Akademy in Leeuwarden for kindly preparing the searchable database of the Dictionary of Old English material, which greatly facilitated the analysis of the Old English data. I am grateful to Merve Altay for her dedicated assistance with technical aspects of the manuscript at the later stage of the project, as well as to Colin Phillips for proofreading parts of the manuscript at various stages.

I wish to express my deepest gratitude to the Series Editor, Professor Hans Frede Nielsen, for accepting the book for the NOWELE Supplement Series and for his trust in this project. I am very grateful to the four anonymous reviewers of the manuscript at John Benjamins, from whose constructive and valuable feedback the text has greatly benefited. I owe a great debt of thanks to Stephen Laker, whose suggestions substantially improved the language, style and structure of the text, but also for his insightful content-related comments. I would also like to thank the editorial team at John Benjamins for editorial and technical work on the manuscript. All the remaining errors are solely mine.

Most importantly, I would like to thank my family and friends who have supported me throughout this project. In particular, I gratefully thank my sister, Magdalena, who was not only always ready to give advice on the text and read fragments of the manuscript, but who also offered me unswerving and dedicated support and on whom I could always rely. My very special thanks are due to my husband, Arjen, who apart from being lovingly supportive and understanding, inspired many ideas in this book. His expertise, insight and genuine fascination for historical linguistics, especially Old Germanic linguistics, never cease to amaze me.